My keystones of doing business

The purpose, the very core of your business, of all the things you would like to do is essential for your success. You should always benchmark your current position in a business or in what you do with where you want to be. Your targets should be always close to impossible. If it’s too easy to get — it is not a goal. A real goal should be achievable with obstacles on your way. You have to make an effort to reach it. Always check yourself, your position with your chart where you wish to be and always keep yourself and your team accountable for how you are progressing. And you need to make progress, even a tiny one, every day. No progress — no success.

You have to understand your success criteria. Your defined goals should be clear and rather practical. They have to get very measurable results and very clear timeline of progress. This is crucial for me. I set defined, simple and clear goals with measurable results so I can check whether I have done it or not, have I reached it on time or am I late for a week or a month.

Care about the stakeholders. You may have stakeholders in the company as your employees or may have them outside the company as your partners. You need to think constantly about all of them. I never understood the companies who don’t care about their customers. They just sell and forget. I never understood managers who treat people with disrespect. When you respect individuals in and outside the company you build a friendly environment for your business.

Do appreciate the responsibility. I hate hierarchy of stars and I like hierarchy of responsibility. This is a new world, where you get a position if you can lead a team. If you want to guide a company or a big organization, you need to earn it by taking full responsibility for it, not by who was your uncle or how much money had you inherited. And those who started working from the very bottom and got to the very top can do incredible things because they learned to be responsible for their actions and decisions. When you work in many different roles in an organization you learn how to be responsible.

It is also about the people you hire. You make a wrong hire, get a wrong member into your team—and you lose in speed, pace and energy. You completely divert yourself from the goal. And the only person to blame is you.